Impressions of Theophrastus Such eBook

find and assimilate the material to supply its own
waste, and then by a further evolution of internal
molecular movements reproduce itself by some process
of fission or budding. This last stage having
been reached, either by man’s contrivance or
as an unforeseen result, one sees that the process
of natural selection must drive men altogether out
of the field; for they will long before have begun
to sink into the miserable condition of those unhappy
characters in fable who, having demons or djinns at
their beck, and being obliged to supply them with
work, found too much of everything done in too short
a time. What demons so potent as molecular movements,
none the less tremendously potent for not carrying
the futile cargo of a consciousness screeching irrelevantly,
like a fowl tied head downmost to the saddle of a
swift horseman? Under such uncomfortable circumstances
our race will have diminished with the diminishing
call on their energies, and by the time that the self-repairing
and reproducing machines arise, all but a few of the
rare inventors, calculators, and speculators will have
become pale, pulpy, and cretinous from fatty or other
degeneration, and behold around them a scanty hydrocephalous
offspring. As to the breed of the ingenious and
intellectual, their nervous systems will at last have
been overwrought in following the molecular revelations
of the immensely more powerful unconscious race, and
they will naturally, as the less energetic combinations
of movement, subside like the flame of a candle in
the sunlight Thus the feebler race, whose corporeal
adjustments happened to be accompanied with a maniacal
consciousness which imagined itself moving its mover,
will have vanished, as all less adapted existences
do before the fittest—­i.e., the existence
composed of the most persistent groups of movements
and the most capable of incorporating new groups in
harmonious relation. Who—­if our consciousness
is, as I have been given to understand, a mere stumbling
of our organisms on their way to unconscious perfection—­who
shall say that those fittest existences will not be
found along the track of what we call inorganic combinations,
which will carry on the most elaborate processes as
mutely and painlessly as we are now told that the minerals
are metamorphosing themselves continually in the dark
laboratory of the earth’s crust? Thus this
planet may be filled with beings who will be blind
and deaf as the inmost rock, yet will execute changes
as delicate and complicated as those of human language
and all the intricate web of what we call its effects,
without sensitive impression, without sensitive impulse:
there may be, let us say, mute orations, mute rhapsodies,
mute discussions, and no consciousness there even to
enjoy the silence.”

“Absurd!” grumbled Trost.

“The supposition is logical,” said I.
“It is well argued from the premises.”

“Whose premises?” cried Trost, turning
on me with some fierceness. “You don’t
mean to call them mine, I hope.”